The end appears to be near for the Mark Foley scandal. Well, not really the end, but rather the end of the mainstream media's interest in the story. Why? Gay rights group Human Rights Campaign quietly announced the dismissal of one of its staff members this week on the grounds that HRC resources had been "inappropriately used." It turns out that the alleged "inappropriate use" was in fact the creation of the now-infamous blog "Stop Sex Predators Now," which orchestrated the leak of the Foley instant messages.

In case you haven't been following the story, the evidence suggests that the Mark Foley scandal was orchestrated according to the following scenario:

Congressional pages, knowing Foley is a closet gay, prank him into joining sexually explicit instant message sessions with them. They save the messages and share them with friends as a joke.

The messages fall into the hands of Democrat operatives, who devise a scheme to get rid of Foley and damage the Republican party during the fall 2006 elections. Democrats had these instant messages for months, perhaps over a year.

Working with at least one member of the Human Rights Campaign, Democrat operatives start the "Stop Sex Predators Now" blog. They shop the instant messages around to various news organizations and finally ABC News' Brian Ross bites.

The story is simultaneously released at SSPN blog, Daily Kos, and ABC News.

Foley immediately resigns in disgrace; Democrats immediately call for the resignation of Speaker Hastert and a full investigation into the entire Republican party leadership in the House of Representatives -- "what did they know and when did they know it."

Ironically, Democrats seem, well, rather reluctant to answer those questions themselves. And in the process of smearing Foley they also dredged up the ugly "all gay men are pedophiles and sexual predators" stereotype that gay rights groups have been fighting to eradicate for decades. Nice going, guys.

I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for
political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor
judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there
is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic,
buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy
gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people
distrust them. Why don't the Democratic strategists see this? These
tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been
more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who -- unless
they're out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag --
simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who
generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the
over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put
into physical danger. It's already starting with news items about
teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and
rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? We saw the
beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential
debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line
identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. Since when does the Democratic
Party use any gay issue in this coldblooded way as a token on the
chessboard? You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not
progressives.

Whether or not this issue results in the Democrats picking up a few seats in the House of Representatives, the truth is that the Foley scandal will bite Democrats hard in the near future. Again -- just so no one misunderstands -- Foley's pederast's fantasies were despicable. Despite the fact that he never actually touched a teenage D. C. page, Foley is not the type of man who should hold public office as a representative of the people. I am glad he resigned. But as I see things, a lot of goodwill between the gay community and the Democrats was lost because of the eagerness with which Democrats pursued the outing and public humiliation of a gay man.

Whatever is left of this scandal can only be bad news for Democrats, so for them and their allies in the mainstream press this scandal is over.

UPATE:The fake blogger has been named. He is Lane Hudson, a former staffer for Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) and former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, also a Democrat. Ace of Spades has a lot more.

It looks like Mark Foley's claim of molestation at the hands of Catholic priests might have some veracity. A guilt-ridden priest, Fr. Anthony Mercieca has come forward and confessed to "a series of encounters that he said Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate" -- but this priest has not been named by Foley or his attorney as the guilty party. The news story suggests that the priest came forward voluntarily.

However, scanning the news story I noticed this:

According to the sources who did not want to be identified, Foley and
his family have discussed Mercieca several times during the past three
or four years, but his mother refused to believe that the priest was
capable of abusing her son.

Foley's father, a stoic ex-Marine, refused to even acknowledge the conversation. (emphasis added)

So, perhaps Foley's father is the classic jarhead tough guy, the kind of man not exactly known for expending a great deal of love and affection on their families. If you can't find attention at home, you find it other places. This one sentence tells me more about Mark Foley than pretty much anything else I have read during the last three weeks.

UPDATE: Now Fr. Mercieca says that the Sarasota Herald Tribune "exaggerated" his remarks.

LaShawn Barber asks a reasonable question in the wake of the Mark Foley cyber-sex scandal and the new dirt being thrown at Senator Larry Craig -- "If a person speaks out against laws, policies, lifestyles, etc., that
you support and you find out he is doing the thing he speaks against,
should you expose them as a hypocrite?"

I think LaShawn is on the right track. I wrote an awful lot about Mark Foley during the last few weeks, but I never defended him or what he did, and I never said that Foley was not a hypocrite. In fact Foley is a HUGE hypocrite. As a politician, he worked to stop sexual predators from using the Internet to snare innocent kids -- yet he had no problem engaging in the same behavior that he publicly condemned.

I simply marveled at the Democrats (who have shamelessly defended some of the biggest hypocrites in the history of American politics) as they tried to play morality police and as they tried to engage in the same gay bashing tactics that they (rightly) accuse Republicans of using. And I was disgusted at their attempt to manufacture a completely phony conspiracy scandal solely for the purpose of forcing Speaker Hastert to resign. What Mark Foley did was despicable, but so was the Democrats' shameless politicizing of the event and their slimy attempt at using homophobia for the clearly obvious purpose of scaring "evangelicals" away from the Republican lever at the voting booth.

As I grow older, politics seems more and more like a truly vile horror movie -- you can't believe the gore and violence that you are witnessing, yet you are completely wrapped up in the story and you can't stop watching until you see how it all ends. I find politics endlessly fascinating, yet at the same time, hopelessly corrupt and morally bankrupt. I doubt I would ever have the stomach to participate in politics at anything more than the local level. And though I tend to vote Republican most of the time, I have pretty much given up hope that the Republican party will ever accomplishing anything outside of retaining and expanding their power at all costs. (For the record, I gave up on the Democrats in that regard a long time ago.)

LaShawn also links to a thought-provoking piece by liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald that amply illustrates the Republicans' continual promotion of the sexual immorality of Democrats in order to win the votes of religious Americans and conservatives, all while turning a blind eye to the moral bankruptcy of many of their own politicians.

But are Democrats any more virtuous? The eagerness with which they abandoned feminism and women's rights in order to slime Paula Jones and defend Bill Clinton, and the eagerness with which they tried to stoke homophobia among Republicans after Mark Foley's double life became public, even after slavishly supporting gay rights for decades, indicates that they are not. If sexual smears are really as repugnant as Democrats claim, and if Democrats are truly as virtuous as they themselves claim, then they should refrain from dragging themselves down to the level of their opponents. Sadly, anything seems to be fair game if it might win an election.

The Republicans claim to stand for "family values," but many of their senior party members do not live lives that reflect those claims. Democrats are quick to smear them as hypocrites, claiming that one's personal life must reflect the values that they preach in public. Yet in order to accommodate the many diverse groups that make up the intellectual left, the Democrats have given up any attempt at defining core moral values for their own party. Perhaps in their own eyes their moral vacuousness makes them immune to charges of hypocrisy, but in reality it only makes them weak, perhaps too weak to be an effective force of leadership.

That, unfortunately, is the state of the political system here in America. Is it any wonder why Christ taught us to build his Kingdom by relating to people one-on-one, as individuals, rather than focusing our efforts on accomplishing "good" through the corrupt human systems of government and power?

(ADDED:Flopping Aces has a good writeup on the Larry Craig smear and its possible unintended negative consequences for Democrats.)

______________________________

I also wanted to take a moment and thank blogger RightWingSparkle for her honesty about why she decided to leave the blogosphere, even though she was at the peak of her popularity and probably destined to become one of the top conservative bloggers in the country. Here's a sample:

Many of you that have been reading this blog for a while have read my
references to my past volunteer work. What you may not know is why I
stopped volunteering except for some Church activities. Several years
ago when I moved from Dallas to Houston I was burned out. So I simply
stopped volunteering when we moved.

... When I served meals on wheels I found that most of the elderly poor’s
problem was not being poor, but in having children who didn’t care
enough for their parents to fix lunches and fill their refrigerators
with food for the week. It was simply easier to let someone else do it.

In helping at a soup kitchen I discovered that drugs hold more people prisoner than any prison in our country.

I
have watched a young teenager kiss her baby goodbye as she gives it to
parents who can give it the kind of life it deserves. A great and noble
sacrifice to be sure, but one that is difficult to watch.

I
found that nursing homes are the loniest places on earth. But it was
there I felt closest to God. It seemed to me that at the beginning of
life and then at the very end, we have forgotten what the value of life
really means.

These were just a few experiences that brought me
down, but what I forgot was that for every negative experience there
were dozens of wonderful life giving and fulfilling experiences.

Politics
isn’t like that. There are no life giving moments. The more I know
about it the more I am astounded that we have anyone of character or
substance in office. Left or right. Why would anyone who has a good
life want to be in office? It’s too mean, too easliy corrupted, and
sometimes truth doesn’t matter. My father refused to run for Governor
so many years ago. Now I understand why.

... So I have to go.

I know this is abrupt and I apologize for that.

But there is a world of need out there and I need to get back to it.

Giving something up while you are on top really takes guts. God bless you lady, for thinking of others instead of yourself.

According to one
political consultant with ties to the DNC and other party
organizations, "I'm hearing the Foley story wasn't supposed to drop
until about ten days out of the election. It was supposed the coup de
grace, not the first shot."

So why the rush? According to
another DNC operative: bad polling numbers across the country. "Bush's
national security speeches were getting traction beyond the base, gas prices were dropping, economic outlook surveys were
positive. We were seeing bad Democratic numbers in Missouri, Michigan,
Washington, Arizona, Florida Pennsylvania, even parts of New York,"
says the operative.

... So how to remedy? "You
pull out the bright shiny things that distract the average American
voter away from the issues we all know they care about -- national
security, anti-terrorism -- and focus on the ugly: Foley and Iraq."

The Democrats seem confident that their scheme worked, based on their bounce in the polls after the scandal broke.

But have you noticed that major news media has drastically reduced its coverage of the story, and prominent Democrats have suddenly ceased their Foley talking points? My guess is that it has to do with Speaker Hastert's promise to fully investigate the source of the incriminating instant messages and to work to dismiss anyone with knowledge of the IM's who did not immediately come forward with them. This morning, the former page at the heart of the alleged IM "prank", Jordan Edmund, was questioned by the FBI here in Oklahoma City.

The Republican leadership is lying when they claim that Democrats have engineered an “October Surprise”; there was never a plan undermine the G.O.P. or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested.

... In May, a source put me in touch with a Democratic operative who
provided me with the now-infamous emails that Foley had sent in 2004 to
a sixteen-year-old page. He also provided several emails that the page
sent to the office of Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana
Republican who had sponsored him when he worked on Capitol Hill. “Maybe
it is just me being paranoid, but seriously, This freaked me out,” the
page wrote in one email. In the fall of 2005, my source had provided
the same material to the St. Petersburg Times—and I presume to The Miami Herald—both which decided against publishing stories.

It
was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but comments he made and
common sense strongly suggest they were originally leaked by a
Republican office. And while it's entirely possible that Democratic
officials became aware of the accusations against Foley, the source was
not working in concert with the national Democratic Party. This person
was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other
publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and
concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages.

Though
the emails were not explicitly sexual, I felt strongly that Foley's
behavior was inappropriate and that his intentions were clear. Why
would a middle-aged man ask a teenager he barely knew for his
photograph, or what he wanted for his birthday? I contacted Foley and
he strongly denied any ill intent. He told me there was “nothing
suggestive or inappropriate” about his emails to the page, adding that
if the page “was intimidated, that's regrettable.”

I have no doubt that Silverstein is telling the truth; the 2004 and 2005 emails had been shopped around to a number of sources as Silverstein claims, including two newspapers in Foley's district. No one published a story because, as Silverstein notes, there was nothing explicitly sexual in the emails. And no one wants to be accused of practicing sexual McCarthyism.

But again, Silverstein's confession does not include any mention of the notorious sexually explicit instant messages. The dissemination of those messages is the heart of the Foleygate scandal.

My prediction: Foleygate will be this year's Enron. Democrats will beat the drums until it is discovered that their fingerprints are all over the scandal. And when there is no longer any chance of convincing the American people that their involvement was purely innocent or accidental, the story will disappear.

"Foleygate", the cooked-up "scandal" purportedly involving a Republican cover-up of Mark Foley's sexual dalliances with underage Congressional pages, is starting to come apart at the seams.

We are all glad that Foley resigned, and I don't know anyone who feels sorry for him in any way. Even if the incriminating instant messages at the heart of this story were part of a prank, Foley's participation in them was both voluntary and eager. And his immediate resignation signals that he knew he had been doing something wrong. The only thing to Foley's credit is that, unlike Gerry Studds and Mel Reynolds, so far we have no evidence of actual sexual contact between Foley and underage teens.

As time passes,
it is increasingly clear that the ABC News report which started the
Foley firestorm is odorous—and I’m not talking Chanel.

(1) It dealt
with the emails which the FBI and many media organizations considered
as innocuous as the Republican leadership did. Who circulated these
reports is not yet clear.Foley’s spokesman said his opponent, Mahoney
had been shopping the story to the media for some time.

(2) ABC was the
first to run with the story which every other media outlet, of the many
which had received the email story, had passed on as unsubstantiated
and not newsworthy. The only new tag for the story was that Mahoney,
Foley’s opponent, called for an investigation, a demand he said was
impelled by a report on a newly created, barely trafficked utterly fake
website designed solely to hide the source of the emails. How did he
happen to come across this website?

(4) Almost
simultaneously with the ABC report, C.R.E.W. placed on its blogsite a
.pdf file purportedly of the same emails. It has refused to disclose to
the FBI their provenance. And an ex-page, Jordan Edmund, later
determined to be one of the ex-pages involved in an IM exchange, posted
notification of the story on the now removed (but screen saved) page
website run by an another ex page, Matthew Loraditch. See post #264 here.)

There is a
suggestion, I think, that he’d been anticipating this story. Did Ross,
or someone acting with him or on his behalf, have contact with the
ex-pages before the initial story ran? Or is this another of the many curious coincidences which surround this story?

(5) Ross reports
that overnight after that story ran, he received racier IMs from other
ex pages. Loraditch, who ran the page website, was quoted by ABC as
saying he’d seen some steamy IMs in which Foley purportedly had been
involved. After considerable ducking, ABC has finally admitted that the
IMs came not from the ex-pages themselves , but from “other pages”.

Were those other
pages Loraditch and Edmunds? And were they alerted by someone to fax
them to Ross as soon as the first story ran? If so, why? If not, had
they given them—wittingly or not—to third parties who provided them to
Ross? Was the second story designed to conflate in the public mind the
notion—utterly false—that Hastert had seen them, too? Or was it just to
keep the story alive?

Read it all. Feldman fails to mention the likewise demonstrably fake "StopSexPredators" blog that pushed the story to DailyKos at the same time that CREW and ABC were "breaking" the story. There is much more, and as details continue to emerge this story looks less and less beneficial to Democrats.

Speaking of which, it looks like the Democrats' biggest objective of the Foley smear -- driving evangelicals away from the Republicans -- has backfired. If the New York Times is reporting this, things can't be good.

Finally, there are so many hypocrisy angles to this story that it is difficult to count them all. I have written at length about the red carpet treatment given to Gerry Studds by the Democrats twenty years ago. Jonah Goldberg notes the about-face given to women's rights issues and sexual harassment when prominent Democrats are accused. JayTea at Wizbang notes how quickly the Democrats turned on Joe Lieberman for not following their flop-flop on Iraq. And The Hatemongers Quarterly notes that the cult play The Vagina Monologues, long championed by feminists and liberals, includes a scene describing the statutory lesbian rape (um, sorry, sexual awakening) of a 13 year old girl by an older woman who gets the young girl drunk before deflowering her. Was Gerry Studds the inspiration for this story?

Perhaps the Left believes that they can avoid charges of hypocrisy by simply believing in everything (or nothing, depending on your point of view). But the way that they abandon core principles and smash those who question party leadership, all in search of votes, is frightening. If I were gay, and especially if I was gay and thinking about a career in politics, I would keep a vigilant eye on the Democrat party.

A J Strata notes many inconsistencies in the emails from CREW, the Democrat-affiliated group said to have first obtained the Foley IM's.

Mac's Mind may have discovered the identity of the "anonymous" source who revealed the Jordan Edmund IM "prank" to Drudge yesterday. He thinks the source may be a former page appointed by ... Nancy Pelosi. The plot thickens.

I asked: Were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff
of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an
intermediary?

[Jeffrey W. Schneider of ABC News] gave an honest response that ABC News obtained the IMs from "former pages who contacted us after reading that first story."

What I should have asked, and what I actually meant to ask, was
whether or not the pages who gave the IMs to ABC News were the same
pages that participated in the instant messaging sessions, or if the
IMs were turned over to ABC News by other Congressional pages who were
not participants in the IMs.

I've asked Mr. Schneider if he would be kind enough to clarify this small but important distinction, and await his response.

Update: Mr. Schneider was kind enough to respond:

As we have reported, the IMs came to us from other pages.

Thus, we can clarify that the Congressional pages who were targeted
by disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley were preyed upon twice; once
by Foley, and for a second time by their fellow pages, who were the
ones who turned the IMs over to ABC News.

Others may have caught this already, but it's news to me that this is confirmed. It seems that Drudge's story yesterday is indeed correct, at least as far as that the saved instant messages obviously got into the wrong hands.

But which page or pages sent the instant messages to ABC News?

The Wall Street Journal indeed confirmed that ABC's Brian Ross received additional IM's from other congressional pages after the story first broke.

So now I guess the question is, who has been involved in collecting all these IM's? The collection period seems to span years, so it is hard for me to believe that this was an accidental or coincidental effort. The most likely explanations are that 1) some pages did individually save IM's from Foley as "insurance" in case they were ever involved in a scandal when Foley's house of cards finally came tumbling down, or 2) a coordinated effort to discredit Foley has been ongoing for years, and in the process this effort has collected a vast number of Foley IM's from pages and others who wanted to see Foley taken down.

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan
Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to
the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by
mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE
REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very
well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to
type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of
young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions
got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the
former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a
second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political
careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the matter.

The prank scenario only applies to the Edmund IM sessions and does
not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former
congressman and others.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones.

Well, this certainly explains a lot.

As the details of this story have unfolded, it is obvious that ABC News had transcripts of dozens of IM sessions between Foley and several teenage boys. It also seems that ABC News knew, well, maybe a few too many biographical details about the boys in the IM sessions.

To me, the probability of such detailed information being obtained by an accidental or random process (such as a third party accidentally stumbling upon the communications) seemed rather small. If this story is true, then ABC News probably received this batch of IM's, along with various details about the teens participating in the messages, from one source.

I believe that source was a group of Democrat operatives.

That would also explain how CREW obtained the messages. And why liberal bloggers began hinting earlier in the year that they had a surefire plan to destroy Mark Foley. And it explains the bogus "StopSexPredators" blog that supposedly obtained these IM's as anonymous submissions from victimized Congressional pages (also a stretch, since StopSexPredators had no inbound links and practically zero traffic at the time the "StopSexPredator" blogger "broke" the story at DailyKos). And it provides a good explanation for the confusion surrounding the ages of the teens -- the messages were sent three years ago, when allegedly was 18 years old, and his compatriots a few years younger, perhaps 16 or 17.

But like all strange fiction, this story was based in fact. Obviously Jordan Edmund and his pals wouldn't have baited Foley into those communications unless they knew that he would take the bait; that is, unless they knew that he was gay and had a thing for teenage boys. That seems to be an undisputed fact, and I suspect that more and more young men will come forward in the next days with stories of Foley making unwelcome advances.

I'm glad that Mark Foley is gone. We don't need lecherous men who prey on teens in the US House of Representatives.

But at the same time, the manner of his outing and departure raises several disturbing "right to privacy" and "gay rights" issues. Specifically, should gay rights groups be angry at the fact that Foley was baited and outed by a group of teenage pranksters? With the involvement of Democrat operatives thrown in, this whole thing looks to me like a textbook case of baiting and entrapment.

And Democrats involved with Foley's outing have some explaining to do as well. When, exactly, did they come into possession of the Edmund IM's? Did they know that the IM's dated from 2003? Did they know that the Speaker's office was investigating claims of inappropriate behavior relating to Mark Foley? Did the Democrats purposefully withhold these messages in order to perpetrate an "October Surprise" and then accuse Speaker Hastert of "not doing enough"?

After running just six posts over
the summer, the site picked up steam on September 21 when its author
wrote, "the blog has been noticed and some shocking emails have been
received!!!!" and posted four emails purportedly from "interns"
outraged by the heretofore unmentioned Foley and his penchant for
teenage boys.

(Of course, if these emails are legit, it means the "interns" somehow stumbled upon the blog, despite the fact that it had not yet been linked to by any other sites, and was virtually indetectible to Google, which ranks sites according to the number of incoming links.)

... Three days later, the blogger posted
the now infamous "Emails from Congressman Foley to 16 Year Old
Page!!!!", claiming they'd been sent in by a reader (despite the fact
that they appeared to be scans of faxed printouts). Persons unknown
then seeded the link to various political sites—including Wonkette, which promptly dismissed them as fakes. ABC, of course, took them more seriously.

Whoever promoted the story on DailyKos did so only 12 minutes after the fateful post went live at 11:06 a.m. (emphasis added)

Hint to future fake bloggers - big-name bloggers don't link to unknown blogs with sparse posts and negligible traffic. If you are going to use a "blog" to break a story, at least make sure that someone is reading or linking to it first.

Anyone who was not living under a rock this past weekend knows that Florida Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican, resigned after ABC News broke a story that Rep. Foley had sent sexually explicit Instant Messages to teenage boys. Foley entered alcohol rehab today. (Yes, alcohol rehab. I just report these things, I don't explain them.)

____________________________________________________

Before I continue with this post, I want to say right now, for the
record, that I am in no way condoning or dismissing Foley's alleged
attempts to troll underage males for sexually explicit talk and
possibly hookups. If these charges are true (and Foley's immediate
resignation seems to be a flashing neon sign saying "YES, THEY ARE
TRUE") then Rep. Foley should be held accountable for his actions. If
these allegations are true, then Rep Foley is a perverted individual
who needs our prayers, but he should not be pardoned or exempted from
prosecution.

Yet the story goes beyond the perversions of a US House of Representatives Member. Democrats are now calling for the resignation of the Speaker of the House and an independent counsel investigation into the conduct of the House Republican Leadership -- the same Democrats who remained curiously silent when Rep. Mel Reynolds, one of their own, was convicted in 1995 of 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice, and solicitation of child pornography in an investigation stemming from accusations that he had sex with a 16 year old campaign worker and then pressured her to lie about it, and was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

The reason for all this Democrat grandstanding is that Speaker Hastert was allegedly given copies of emails (that's EMAILS, not INSTANT MESSAGES) that Rep. Foley sent to a 16 year old Congressional page last year. The emails allegedly "creeped out" the page (in one email, Foley asked the page to send him a photo of himself) and officials sent the emails and a written report to Hastert, asking him to keep an eye on Foley. Allegedly Speaker Hastert told Rep. Foley to cease contact with the page who had filed the complaint. The material in these emails was hardly actionable, though, and if this is all the information that Hastert had about Foley then he was right not to push the issue any further.

The charges levied at Rep. Foley by ABC News were supported by copies of Instant Messages obtained by a liberal activist group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington). These newer INSTANT MESSAGES -- not the EMAILS sent to Speaker Hastert -- contained the sexually explicit conversations between Rep. Foley and several underage males. Again, these communications were NOT the emails given to Rep. Hastert last year. (Correction: it appears that some of these IM's were up to three years old. Who was sitting on them for so long, and allowing Foley to prey on underage boys for all that time?)

But no matter, the Democrats are already tasting blood. They even have a strategy worked out to take political advantage of this situation. (And these are the guys who continually accuse President Bush of "politicizing" 9/11? It is to laugh.)

They are using this situation to do as much damage to the Republican party as possible, and damn the poor kids that Rep. Foley allegedly preyed on. Who needs them anyway, right? Let's go straight for the Speaker of the House.

That in itself is as disgusting as Rep. Foley's alleged behavior.

The Foley incident set off some distant alarm bells inside my head: "Where have I heard this guy's name before. And haven't gay and liberal blogs been threatening to launch devastating "outing" campaigns against the Republicans?"

My hunch was proved right by Gatewaypundit, who found the site that specifically threatened to out Rep. Foley.

And I did a little Googling as well, and found this post from post from "Eric's Blog" dated May 2003, Wrestling Alligators:

If Congressman Mark Foley is going to come out of the
closet; it seems that he's not going to do it willingly, or gracefully.
After a recent report in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, the
Washington Blade picked up the story (guaranteeing that Capitol Queers
like me would pick up on it). Suspicious that the Sun-Sentinel would
report on the story; Foley decided to head off mainstream media
coverage by... calling a press conference!

... FOLEY: "I'm declaring today that I have a right to privacy,
like anyone else in this country. The fact that I'm not married has led
many people to speculate, but I'm not going to be dragged into the
gutter by these rumormongers" (Smith, St. Petersburg Times, 5/23).

Of course this doesn't prove or disprove the veracity of the various
emails and IM's that Foley is alleged to have sent, but it further
illustrates that Foley has been a target for "outing" for some time.

But what about Speaker Hastert? Did he do the right thing? Think about Hastert's dilemma. If he came down hard on Foley last year, maybe asking him to resign, then Foley would have instantly been turned into a gay rights martyr. (Don't doubt me on this; even though they were gunning for him, radical gay rights leaders would have cast him as a victim if someone else outed him first, especially a Republican.) Now, Democrats are saying that Hastert didn't do enough to take down Foley. It's a lose-lose situation.

And the Democrats themselves are not in the clear on this. If further investigation shows that Democrat operatives like CREW had access to the sexually explicit IM's that proved Foley was preying on underage boys, and deliberately withheld them in order to create a politically devastating "October Suprise," then they are guilty of breaking the law as well.

In the days of yore, the Democrats could count on the news media to act as an unpaid press release service for them. But now there are blogs, and behind the blogs is an army of pajama-clad Davids, examining stories like this one and publishing their work online. If there is more to this story that needs to be reported, blogs will report it.